What’s Wrong with Rights. By Nigel Biggar

Abstract

This volume is a cleverly titled, briskly paced, and hard-hitting study of the history, concept, and limits of rights and rights talk in the Western tradition and beyond. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, brings a powerful analytical mind to the task, and a pair of sharp elbows, too, as he wades into the crowded interdisciplinary field of human rights study. Biggar’s sceptical attack on many forms and forums of historical and modern rights has won dust jacket raves and reviews from several fellow Christian scholars. But the book has also raised the hackles of several jurists and others who bristle at the author’s defence of torture and warfare, his disdain for judicial activism, and his sometimes blistering rebuke of national and international human rights instruments, tribunals, cases, judges, and legal counsel. I come to this book as a legal historian and find it learned and provocative, but also limited and flawed at critical points.